Whether you're sick to death of the word "blog" or have no idea what it means, you are equally abreast of the times, linguistically speaking. Merriam-Webster, the U.S. dictionary publisher, recently declared it the most looked-up term on its Internet site this year, not counting profanities and perennial problem words such as "affect" and "effect." Commentators at once dubbed 2004 the Year of the Blog.
To those of you who failed to seek enlightenment from Merriam-Webster, the word doesn't signify either the Year of the Especially Bad Mood or the Year of the Obscure but Potent Scandinavian Beverage. Blog, now happily free of quotation marks, is a contraction of the phrase "Weblog" and denotes "a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments and often hyperlinks."
(Yes, we realize some of you don't know what a hyperlink is. But again, Merriam-Webster is helpful. "Hyperlink: an electronic link providing direct access from one distinctively marked place in a hypertext or hypermedia document to another in the same or a different document." And if you don't know what a hypertext or hypermedia document is, you probably don't care what a blog is, either.) In nondictionary lingo, then, a blog is the modern person's soapbox, only better. Just as Britons with opinions -- but with no opinion column -- have long preached to the crowds at Speaker's Corner in London's Hyde Park every Sunday, their more technologically adept brethren pitch their views to the whole planet, or those bits of it with an Internet connection and a lot of free time.